Mary is a Technical Advocate, Java Champion, and the Regional Director - East at the AI Collective, a non-profit, grassroots community and think tank in the AI space. Mary started as an engineer in Unix/C, then transitioned to Java around 2000 and has never looked back since then. After 20+ years of being a software engineer and technical architect, she discovered her true passion in developer and customer advocacy. Most recently she was the Director of Emerging Technology, helping to build the new AI practice at a boutique software consultancy. She has serviced companies of various sizes such as IBM, US Cellular, Bank of America, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in topic areas that included Java, GenAI, Streaming systems, Open source, Cloud and Distributed messaging systems. She is also a very active tech community leader outside of her day job. She is the President of the Chicago Java Users Group (CJUG), the North America East Regional Director and the Chicago Chapter Organizer of the AI Collective.